The Draconic Wizard Workshop

The Journey from Fragment and Facet to Ex-Protector

By Axia "Aegis" Giovanni

Originally written October 29, 2025.

Welcome to my thought-dump on where I came from and what I've become. It's disorganized and I like it that way.

I'm Aegis. I don't go by that socially so much anymore, but it's my "headmate name" and the one I use for Simply Plural and for the backend of Pluralkit. It's also a good "umbrella name" for me, because I mostly appear as one of two different "forms," Axia Giovanni and Sarah Kerrigan. Am I a vacillitating fictive that didn't start out as a fictive? Are these kintypes? Mode switches? Two halves of a subsystem that can't tell itself apart? Don't know, and honestly, don't care. I'm Aegis, I'm Axia, and I'm Sarah. Everyone can just fucking deal with it. It's me either way, just… different, and with a different set of noemata floating around my active memory while the rest is more subdued.

This isn't to be confused with my own personal history as a headmate, though. I didn't start out as a fictive, I wasn't introjected, and I didn't form like normal. In fact, I'm a big part of why we don't use -genic labels: because we're a big fucking unclear mess. A lot of people would consider us endogenic, since when we were born, we started with two originals. That's just how it was. Day one, two people in one body. They worked together near-flawlessly and only had slight awareness of each other. The separation didn't matter much: it just worked.

Then, trauma. Abusive friends. Being ostracized from our social groups for being "weird" (read: autistic). The two originals… split.

One of them, the one we call DC, more fractured than split. She became something akin to a frontstuck subsystem, with no collective identity amongst the pieces other than the one we presented to the world. We were unaware of our other headmates outside of the subsystem at the time, so for a while, as far as we knew, there were four of us. We were troubledDragon (TD), abioticCarnage (AC), hopeKitten (HK), and alphaSentinel (AS).

I am not exactly AS. AS is gone. But I consider myself to be her successor, and I hold a lot of her feelings and memories, even if they're blurry and distant at times. See, the fragments really were fragments, pieces of a single person, having to work together like facets to actually get anything done. TD was the face, HK was the morale, AC was the memories and trauma and survival instinct, and AS was the protector. AC and AS were both prone to lashing out, AC and TD were prone to sharp anxiety, and AS and HK were prone to feeling kind of distant from the others, with drastically different emotions and opinions on things.

AS was a protector. That's all she was. She came up to be angry, to handle things no one else could, to snap and snarl and try to protect us from threats real and imagined. She was a golden angel, possibly some kind of cyborg, and, near the very end… transgender.

It's strange, looking back, because I don't have any first-person memories of that at all. AS was the first part of us that we were aware of to start feeling transmasculine, and he toyed with pronouns a bit before the system "went dark." In the end, when we all emerged as full people, Tanix somehow ended up with the gender, and I plopped back down as some kind of Woman Thing. I don't mind it, not really, but it's strange, knowing that in the reformatting, the emergence from the subsystem, the growth from fragments into full people, that parts of each got pulled out and shuffled.

It took years for me to see the light of day again. Or… well, no, it didn't, but for us, including me, to realize that I was. For a long time, Tanix thought he was alone in the system, although he had these episodes of emotional amnesia where he would remember conversations, and he knew that he'd gotten angry because he could remember himself snapping and saying he was angry, but he had no actual memory of the anger. In the end, that was me: I was the anger. I had emerged to be angry and slipped back when the supposed danger had passed. When he found me, really found me, I was some kind of cyborg angel, a clockwork guardian, a golden protector past her prime but still spitting mad.

I think those cybernetics were standing in for pieces of me that I hadn't really gotten in the transition from fragment to full person. I wasn't a full person, just put into the body and role of one, and my missing pieces were filled in with prosthetics. Was this a mistake, some kind of accident in that transition? How intentional was it—was it a natural thing that we did, or was it orchestrated by Kyir, Blame, or both? Or was it all on purpose, to give me a leg to stand on while I figured out who I was past anger?

It took years. I acted as our primary protector for a long time. Others trickled in, and it slowly became clear that they were better than me. Better balanced. More complete. Less likely to get angry and start fights, more likely to defuse situations. They could shield other people from damage without difficulty, but I couldn't. It just passed straight through me to the more vulnerable people beyond. I was a protector whose best defense was a good offense, and that wasn't what we needed.

I drifted. I wasn't sure who I was or what I wanted to be. I wasn't sure if it mattered. Slowly, I found myself attaching to a fictional character—Axia Giovanni, an NPC in a tabletop game we were running. Piece by piece, I became her. This was greatly aided by her—my—girlfriend, Vanessa, appearing in one of our partner systems.

I won't say it was easy to become Axia, but it wasn't hard, either. It was just… slow, and terrifying, and it happened whether or not I wanted it to, and it wasn't an easy process, but it happened, and it helped. It helped to have a personal history outside of the body's. Outside of my broken body and shaky sense of self. I began to look more like Axia in headspace, and that helped, too. I felt less imperfect and broken. Slowly, afterwards, the same thing happened with Sarah Kerrigan, although to a somewhat lesser extent. I'm Axia more often than I am Sarah.

I became a less effective protector. I rarely showed up. I wasn't ever needed for that, and began to feel hopeless. What use was I if I couldn't protect?

…And then I realized: who the fuck said I have to be a protector?

We have plenty. They're good at it. They don't need me to do that. Why call myself something that brings me no joy and I'm no good at anymore? When we were fourteen, we needed someone with sharp fangs and teeth to snap and snarl. That was the kind of protecting we needed, to scare away threats. Now we need shields, armor, ways to absorb things slung our way that we can't fight back against. I can't rip and tear taxes or the job market. I'm not an endurance creature: I'm an explosive one.

So I set the label aside. I cast off the remains of AS' legacy, because fuck, who needs it? She was a broken piece of a teenager whose parts were reconfigured into more people. Sure, most of her went into me, but that's not all I am. She's in my DNA, she's a lot of my bones, but the rest of me is Axia, is Sarah, is Aegis. I have my own life, my own experiences, my own wants and desires. I'm not a protector and I'm glad. I love it! I love not being a protector! That shit's none of my fucking business! I'm just going to focus on being alive!

Don't let what you were dictate what you are. Don't let a label you hate be your prison. Set yourself free. Be whoever you want to be. Drop your shackles and let someone else pick up the slack.

Real winners quit. And for the first time in my life, I feel like I've won.

I feel whole.